The Body’s Temple

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By Deborah Friedell

Sept. 12, 2014

When Anne Darwin died just after her 10th birthday in 1851, her father “lost the joy of the Household.” No longer could he see “as plainly as others do, and as I should wish to do, evidence of design and beneficence on all sides of us. There seems to me too much misery in the world.” Charles Darwin’s faith was gone; he began writing “On the Origin of Species.” As Ian McEwan has told interviewers, “rather like Darwin when his favorite daughter died,” on Sept. 11 he “felt, more than ever,” that there was no God, and that “religion was distinctly unhelpful in making compassionate, reasonable judgments about people’s lives. On the whole, the secular mind seems far superior in making reasonable judgments.” In McEwan’s early novels, intelligent characters had often “slithered” along the “axis of belief and unbelief,” just as he had. Not anymore. Atheism and the secular state are under attack, and he must defend them.

“The Children Act” tells the story of a British High Court judge whose docket is overwhelmed by the woes of families and the faithful: “divorcing Jewish parents, unequally Orthodox, disputing their daughters’ education”; Catholic parents who refuse to separate their conjoined twins, even if it means that they’ll die, “in order not to interfere with God’s purpose.” The novel’s first sentences — “London. Trinity term one week old. Implacable June weather” — are supposed to make us think of “Bleak House,” but Fiona Maye is nothing like Dickens’s judges, who fall asleep on the bench and are more concerned with the quality of Inner Temple mutton than with justice. Indeed, Justice Maye is nearly indefectible: wise, learned, conscientious, compassionate. Her life’s work is bringing “reasonableness to hopeless situations.” Who wouldn’t want to vest the power of the state in her, even if she doesn’t believe in God?

Despite her many commitments, her to-do list includes a “letter to draft about a special school for the cleaning lady’s autistic son.” Neither the cleaning lady nor her son is otherwise mentioned in the book; their only purpose is to underscore Maye’s decency. Her sole failing is that she cares too much about the people who come before her, and the case of the conjoined twins in particular has left her depressed and uninterested in sex, imperiling her marriage. By the end of the novel, she must find a way to get her groove back. At the same time, she must make a decision about whether Adam Henry, a ­Jehovah’s Witness with leukemia, should be forced to undergo a blood transfusion that is necessary to save his life but which his religion prohibits. He’s only a few months shy of his 18th birthday, when under British law he would be allowed to decide for himself.

How should the judge rule? On the one hand: sanctity of life. On the other: personal autonomy, the right to make one’s own decisions, however wrongheaded, about medical treatment. The transfusion must happen soon if Adam is to survive, and most of the book takes place over the few days in which he and his parents attempt to persuade Maye to leave them alone. Although Adam’s faith drives the plot, it goes oddly unexplored. McEwan seems to have little interest in Jehovah’s Witnesses, and apart from their prohibition against blood transfusions we are told very little about what they believe and almost nothing about their history. This is peculiar, because McEwan is usually one of the most inquisitive of novelists. For previous books about neurosurgeons or physicists or posh girls during World War II, he so intensely studied his characters’ worlds that he was able to write about them seemingly from the inside. Yet Adam’s beliefs never seem particular, as though he could be representing any stubborn believer. This vagueness makes the novel seem more allegorical than real, a kind of fable about Faith versus Science and the State. I wonder if McEwan’s ­Jehovah’s Witnesses remain vague because they are really standing in for something else, which he felt unable to write about directly.

McEwan partly grew up on a military base in Libya, and has spoken about his long interest in Islam. But in an interview a few years ago, he told Richard Dawkins that he never felt free to write about Muslims: “To be really frank about Islam would cause you to look a little nervously behind you.” When the fatwa against Salman Rushdie was announced, McEwan hid him in his own house. After he gave an Italian newspaper a sound bite about his thoughts on Islam (“I myself despise Islamism, because it wants to create a society that I detest”) in 2008, he thought that his life might be in danger. “Look at the Islamist websites,” he told The New Yorker. “They want me dead.”

A newcomer to McEwan will find little here to indicate why his reputation as a storyteller is so tremendous. There is no dazzling opening scene, as in the balloon crash in “Enduring Love,” or fabulous set piece, as in the evacuation from Dunkirk in “Atonement.” There is none of the humor of “Solar,” or the wonderful wicked perversity of “The Cement Garden” and “First Love, Last Rites.” The novelist has never been as nakedly polemical as he is here, and the only scene in “The Children Act” that seems purely McEwanesque is one of its least plausible. During a home invasion in “Saturday,” a young woman recites Matthew Arnold’s “Dover Beach,” and the man who was on the verge of raping her is so moved — “It’s beautiful. You know that, don’t you. It’s beautiful” — that he leaves her alone. In “The Children Act,” Fiona, meeting Adam in the hospital, sings to him lines from Yeats’s “Down by the Salley Gardens.” In its last couplet — “She bid me take life easy, as the grass grows on the weirs; / But I was young and foolish, and now am full of tears” — he recognizes himself. Art, life, love: All seem open to him, and as if for the first time, he senses that the world outside his sect might have something going for it after all. The only complication is that Adam confuses his passion for the poem with passion for the 59-year-old woman who introduced him to it; maudlin complications ensue. McEwan may disdain belief in the supernatural, but the powers he claims on behalf of literature must also be taken on faith.